On May 7, 2019, the 2019 Hungarian Corporate and Public Administration Blockchain Conference was organised by the BCC.

After a welcome from Péter Benedek (BCC CEO), the conference was first opened by chief advisor László Jakab from the ITM and then by deputy state secretary Károly Hajzer from the BM.

Mr. Jakab said that the blockchain working group operating under his direction, with the professional participation of the BCC, began operational work in the direction of regulating the technology. In addition, he emphasized that it is a great fact that Hungary also joined the EU Blockchain Partnership in February this year. And Károly Hajzer announced that, according to BM’s plans, the first project in which the blockchain will be integrated as an integral part of the project is already being determined.

Afterwards, the participants of the conference could listen to the video message of Caroline Malcom, head of the OECD Blockchain Policy Center, which ended with the catchy phrase ‘May the blockchain be with you’. 

In his presentation, Dr. Viktor Vajda, lawyer of the BCC, talked about smart contracts and the important thing that in the case of smart contracts, it will be necessary to integrate them into the existing legal framework, this process cannot be avoided.

The conference changed after the presentations and continued with round table discussions.

In the first round table, Ferenc Vágujhelyi (NHIT President), András Both (Idomsoft Deputy CEO), Gergely Gabler (MNB Director) and Jenei Zoltán Jenei (PTE Chancellor) moderated Ildikó Taksz (KPMG lead partner) who shared their thoughts on the topic of institutional blockchain. The parties agreed that blockchain has already reached the level where it can be included among the innovation tools that institutions have already started using.

After the break, the participants of the blockchain-as-a-service round table (TC2 – AWS, IBM, Microsoft, Digital Asset) assured those present that there are good and sufficient tools available from the technological side and they are able to support business processes.

This was followed by the representatives of the Big 4 in a subsequent round table, and they talked about the fact that they are already dealing with the inclusion of the technology in their own consulting portfolio on a global level, but they thought it important to point out that l’art pour l’art blockchain projects do not support it, and then recommend it to their clients the blockchain, when it really seems to be the best solution for solving a given sub-task of a given project.

At the end of the conference, 4 Hungarian companies (TE-Food, Meddictive, Rowanhill Global and InterTicket) talked about how they started working with blockchain and what difficulties they faced in recent years.

As a summary, Péter Benedek said that fortunately, a very positive process has taken place on the subject only in the past year, and enormous progress has been made. At the next conference, we will be able to focus on already implemented and implemented projects.